So a lot of folks on social media talk about more work-life balance in SaaS, and I totally get it. 

Every month, every quarter, the number needs to go up in sales.  Layoffs in some cases have been brutal.  The pressure can be intense, and even if it’s not intense, it’s just … there.

Especially in venture-backed startups with high growth expectations.  “Unicorn” sounded like a rite of passage in 2021.  

Fast forward to today, being part of a “unicorn” can seem like a great weight on the shoulders.

One thing I’ve seen as a result is folks in sales truly willing to trade less comp for less work. 

For the first time in my career.

For years, reps all seemed to want top comp, period.  Work hard, play hard. 

Leaderboards.  Internal competition.  Who made the most last month.  The big SKO blow outs.

And in 2021, all everyone seemed to want was higher and higher OTEs, often fueled by bigger and bigger venture rounds.  Some still do.  But others want a saner approach to sales, both at the AE and the VP level.

It first I think showed up in the explosion of side hustles.  We’ve also seen it in the deep appeal (if limited success stories) of solopreneurs.  Everyone for a while wanted to sell courses.

Today, it may evolve into just finding roles.

So most everyone is still working on figuring out just how distributed, hybrid, etc. we all want to be — and can be.

Harry Stebbings recently did a great 20VC with Marc Benioff and there’s a ton of great stuff in there.

One I found interesting was their Work from Home policy, circa now:

• Engineers just need to come to the office 10 days a quarter
• Sales & Marketing has to come to the office 3 days a week
• Marc works mostly from home himself, but “needs to be with his customers all the time”.  Digital is OK sometimes — he does digital days, and “being in person with customers is critical.”

These are tough issues and I don’t think there are perfect answers.  I do think this is roughly what most scale-ups would like though, having talked to many CEOs, CROs and more at 2023 SaaStr Annual.

This edition of the SaaStr Weekly is sponsored in part by New Zealand Trade & Enterprise 

We think globally from day one and understand how to partner internationally, scale at speed, and deliver localized solutions to meet the needs of markets worldwide. There’s a reason why our companies are trusted by some of the biggest brands in the world.

So Databricks hasn’t IPO’d yet — hopefully it will in the next 9-12 months to help keep the just reopened IPO window … well, open.

But as part of its most recent private round at a $43 Billion valuation, it did disclose enough interesting metrics to do 5 Interesting Learnings.

#1.  Growing Over 50% at $1.5 Billion in ARR.

This is mighty impressive in general, but especially in today’s still murky “macro” environment of higher interest rates and more budget scrutiny.  Like its rival Snowflake, Databricks business remains extremely healthy.  Growth at $800m ARR, during Peak Best of Times, was about 75%.

So Klaviyo and Instacart reopened the IPO markets — from a 20 year low. 

We are back.  At least, for the very best. 

Mostly.

Two great leaders, worth almost $10B now and public, and both “priced” at the high end of the IPO ranges.

Klaviyo is the more relevant for us in SaaS, and it’s a monster:

• $650,000,000 in ARR (!)
• Growing a stunning 56.5% at this scale (!!)
• 119% NRR from SMBs
• Profitable, and only burned $15m net to date
• 130,000 total customers

That’s really just about as good as it gets in SaaS, folks.  It has a few risks.  It’s dependent on Shopify, and growth in some of its core customer segments have slowed as it’s dominated those markets.  But other than that, it’s just about as good as it gets.

I’m actually not that good at sales myself. But — I have observed a lot of successful sales folks and leaders.

What I’ve learned is that sales is never easy. It’s hard. But if you are gonna do it, it’s not that hard to be in the Top 25% — if you can do it all. There’s a playbook almost anyone can follow.

Here’s my Simple Guide To Be In The Top 25% of Sales Reps:

• Sell a product you truly believe in. If you don’t, sell something else. You won’t go the extra mile if you don’t believe.  
• Know the product cold. All of it. If you do, you can, if nothing else, add tons of value to your prospects. That alone is probably enough to put you in the top 1/3d of sales reps. Know every feature. Every core configuration. Know exactly the use cases for 20 top customers. Know why they picked you. Know where the feature gaps are, and how to honestly work around them. Know the competition cold. Speak with integrity here because you know. Very few reps really can do this. But almost anyone can if they want to put in the time.
• Work harder. Work all the leads. Working harder works in any profession. But many in sales just don’t work anything but the hottest leads all that hard.  They barely follow up with the rest.  But there’s real money in the rest.  

One of the open secrets behind a lot of great SaaS companies is going multi-product. Jack Altman, CEO and co-founder of Lattice, firmly believes that many more companies should be multi-product, and many should go multi-product earlier than they think.

Lattice has launched four product suites in the last eight years, and the ideas that drove their growth apply to most companies today.

• SaaStr 689: The Latest 2023 Napkin Reveal: What it Takes to Raise Capital with Christoph Janz, General Partner of Point Nine Capital

• SaaStr 688: The State of the Cloud 2023 with Bessemer Venture Partners                                  

• SaaStr 687: Building a Global SaaS Empire: Freshworks Founder & CEO Girish Mathrubootham on His Biggest Bets   

Listen on Apple Podcast, Google Podcasts or Spotify

You know @garrytan runs YC like he founded it

That's so rare

If you ever get someone like that on your team, or to join as CEO later, realize how rare it really is

If you aren't 90%+ sure you can IPO some day, for real,

I wouldn't raise above $100m valuation, period, no matter what the metrics Not worth it

You've made all the other paths harder and likely much less lucrative

Reasons I've lost money investing, or had mediocre outcome:

- founder wars

- CEO misled on metrics

- CEO ignored zero cash date

What didn't stop unicorn outcomes:

- one terrible year

- bigger competitors

- taking a long time

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